Growing populations and economies have resulted in a steady need to increase agricultural output. Chemical pesticides and synthetic plant growth regulators have been applied as part of a greater effort to increase the efficiency of agricultural production. However, such agricultural additives are recognized as often having serious environmental and public health issues. Additionally, continuous and/or over-application of many pesticides have led to tolerance in many plant and animal pathogens. Accordingly, there are efforts to replace the application of synthetic chemicals with the use of more environmentally friendly approaches. Such approaches include use of living microorganisms and the biochemicals produced by naturally occurring microorganisms as agricultural formulations to control pests or provide natural plant growth regulators.
However, current methods of growing and formulating living microorganisms for agricultural applications rarely generate products that are cost effective, especially for low value crops. Current approaches for generating the living bioproducts, and applying them to the target crops, have generally resulted in large production inefficiencies, reduced efficacies of the produced microorganisms and reduced microbial survival/colonization in treated environments. Current formulations of microorganisms have failed to meet optimal performance expectations primarily because the organisms are typically cultured under conditions that are very divergent from their normal environment and the environment where they are deployed. Furthermore, the organisms undergo extensive post-culture processing to separate them from the growth media and to prepare the microorganisms for storage and distribution. This often results in a bioproduct with a high proportion of the microorganisms existing in a quiescent state, such as a spore form. This creates a slow ramp up time to the point that the microorganisms cannot actively compete against the existing populations in the environment and, therefore, to actively promote or otherwise affect the growth of the plant. Accordingly, these approaches reduce the capacity of the produced microorganisms to successfully colonize the environment to which they are applied. As a result, a significant portion of the applied microorganisms fails to grow or fails to compete with the populations already present in the plant environment.
To compensate for such performance shortfalls of the cultured microorganisms, greater applied quantities of the bioproducts are utilized, requiring a greater investment of initial resources. This typically makes this type of treatment economically uncompetitive or even prohibitive for less lucrative crops.
Accordingly, a need remains for active microorganisms and microbe-based biological products that can be economically produced, distributed, and applied in the field for efficient and effective promotion of plant cultivation. The present disclosure addresses this and related needs.